Why accommodating your loved one with OCD is actually hurting them

It’s easy to feel helpless when your child or partner has severe anxiety or OCD. However, there is often a lot you can do to help your loved one learn to manage their anxiety. I once worked with a 13 year old girl with severe OCD whose mother allowed her 1 hour of “worry time” everyday to talk about all of her anxieties. They thought this was a great solution because it allowed the girl to talk about her feelings but “limited” the anxiety talk to a set amount of time. 

They were very shocked when, during the first session, I said that the “worry time” had to go. I explained that this was a form of accommodation that might be inadvertently making the daughter’s anxiety worse by giving her a huge opportunity everyday to play out her concerns and receive reassurance and validation from her mom. I suggested that, by eliminating “worry time,” the girl would have to learn how to manage her anxious thoughts independently. The family was skeptical, but they agreed to give it a try.

A month later, the girl reported, “I don’t even miss ‘worry time’ anymore!” By eliminating this parental accommodation, the mother empowered her daughter to discover that she could actually manage her anxiety on her own most of the time. This freed up a big part of their day to discuss other things and improved their relationship over time. 

Accommodation doesn’t only happen between parents and children though. One client with religious OCD became uncontrollably worried when she saw her husband look at his phone during sacrament meeting. She was worried that looking at his phone was an indication that her husband had lost his testimony and would end up leaving the Church. In an attempt to reassure his wife, the husband agreed not to look at his phone during sacrament meeting anymore. 

However, within a few weeks, his wife had become concerned that he wasn’t always singing the hymns during the same meeting. She had the exact same worries about his faithfulness and his ability to stay in the Church. It was a slippery slope. Nothing the husband could do would ever be enough to fully convince his wife that he would always remain active.

He eventually decided to resume behaving in a normal and natural way during sacrament meeting. This was very difficult at first for his wife, but she eventually learned that her husband’s decision to look at his phone during a church meeting had no bearing on his testimony or his faithfulness. Just as with the girl in the first example, this woman learned how to manage her anxieties when family accommodations were removed.

We have a lot of evidence to support the efficacy of this approach in managing anxiety. You can check out a few articles that highlight the latest research here, here, and here. It can feel very counterintuitive to reduce accommodations for your anxious loved one, but we know this is one of the best ways to help them achieve long-term success in managing their anxiety. 

For parents, I am trained in the method mentioned in these articles, Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE) and offer 8 week SPACE courses 2-3 times per year. If you are interested in getting on the waitlist for my next session, please feel free to email me at claire@mountainhomeocd.com.

I know that reducing accommodations can be scary and difficult, and, as a result, I regularly offer family sessions to support my clients’ loved ones as they make changes that will help their loved one overcome their OCD and thrive. Your loved one’s anxiety is definitely not your fault, but some of the things that we instinctively want to do to support the people we love can actually be making their anxiety worse. I can help guide you through evidence-based best practices you can implement that have been proven to reduce symptoms of anxiety and OCD in children and adults.